New Delhi:Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani plans to hold a rally on Parliament Street in Delhi on Tuesday.

The Delhi Police has not given a go-ahead to the Vadgam MLA’s request as yet.

“No permission granted so far by Delhi Police to hold the proposed protest at Parliament Street in view of NGT orders. Organisers have been constantly advised to go to an alternate site, which they are reluctant to accept,” the office of Deputy Commissioner of Police, New Delhi, tweeted on Monday night.

However, the organisers have confirmed to news agency PTI that they would be going ahead with their plan.

The ‘Social Justice’ rally or ‘Yuva Hunkaar Rally’ is planned to be addressed by Mevani along with Assam peasant leader Akhil Gogoi.

Gujarat Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani had on January 05 asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi if Dalits in the country had a right to hold peaceful protest rallies and urged him to speak up on the violence against the community in the last three years.

The NGT on October 05 last year had ordered officials to “immediately stop all activities of dharna, protest, agitations, assembling of people, public speeches and using of loudspeakers among others at the Jantar Mantar Road.”

One of the organisers and former JNU Students’ Union president Mohit Kumar Pandey said, “There has been a lot of attempts to stop this event and even some media houses are spreading wrong information that the permission for the rally has been denied.”

Ever since the rally was announced on January 2, “a lot of money has been spent on posters calling Mevani a deshdrohi (traitor) and urban Naxal,” Pandey told PTI, adding the event will be held as per schedule.

Mevani could not be reached for his comments.

In a statement, the organisers have urged the prospective participants to “assemble on the Parliament Street at 12 pm on tomorrow”.

The rally seeks to raise the demand for the release of Dalit outfit Bhim Army’s founder Chandrashekhar Azad and put an emphasis on issues like educational rights, employment, livelihood and gender justice.

A large section of students from universities and colleges in Delhi, women’s groups, teachers’ associations and activists associated with Mevani from across the country are expected to attend the rally.

Azad, 30, was arrested in June last year from Himachal Pradesh as he was the main accused in the Thakur-Dalit clash in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur district.

Notably, the Pune Police have registered an FIR against Mevani for allegedly inciting passions between communities.

The FIR was lodged earlier this month following a complaint by a 22-year-old student, Akshay G Bikkad, of Pune who took objections to the speeches by Mevani and Khalid at Shaniwarwada on December 31.

In his complaint, Bikkad had said that at a ‘Yalgar Parishad’ held that day, the two speakers made inflammatory speeches that could create misunderstanding between communities.

The complainant added excerpts from the speech by Mevani: “The (January 1, 1881) battle of Koregaon-Bhima can be a war of tomorrow. If they attack, it is time to retaliate, and winning this war will be a tribute to the martyrs. Crushing the new ‘Peshwai’ can be a homage to the heroes of the Koregaon-Bhima battle.”

The complainant said that such inflammatory speech can create a wedge and enmity between communities and that provoked by these utterances some unknown miscreants attacked the Victory Pillar (Vijay Stambh) in Koregaon-Bhima, resulting in riots and arson on January 01.

Hours after the FIR by Pune Police, the Mumbai Police had denied permission for a Chhatra Bharati-sponsored All India National Students Summit scheduled in Vile Parle on January 04.

The developments came in the wake of a series of disturbances in Maharashtra starting with the desecration of a monument in Vadhu Budruk on December 29, followed by the riots in Koregaon-Bhima that left one dead on January 1, the ‘Maharashtra Shutdown’ that killed a boy and left a trail of destruction across the state.